I have been in Hong Kong chairing Informa's Broadband World Forum Asia 2013, where the crème de la crème of the region's broadband operators gathered.

Telco operators in Hong Kong can connect fibre to people in multi-dwellings for as low as $130 per home.Credit:iStock

Meanwhile, Malcolm Turnbull unveiled the Coalition's national broadband network policy, which has, quite predictably, been hammered by fans of the current NBN model.

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For someone who has spent the past decade covering the Asia-Pacific fibre-to-the-home (FTTH), market the political discourse in Australia over the NBN is very disconcerting.

You see, my range of life skills is very narrow: I can't fix cars, conduct simple DIY jobs, repair broken computers or anything practically useful, but what I do have is a deep knowledge of broadband; it's my safety blanket, if you will.

Imagine my surprise then these past couple of years as the NBN debate has raged to find that so many of my fellow Australians are also experts in the field. It certainly deflates the ego.

I understand why so many people are so passionately committed to the current FTTH model. Who wouldn't want their country to have the best broadband network in the world?

However, if you want to demand the current "full cream" FTTH model you need to understand that deploying this is going to take a hell of a long time and cost a huge amount of money. It's a gargantuan task.

The Asian operator executives I spoke to in Hong Kong - people who have already built their own FTTH networks - go ashen faced when asked to consider the possibility of deploying similar networks in Australia.

These guys have had a hard enough time deploying their FTTH networks in their own highly urbanised markets where most people live in multi-dwelling units. Doing it in the vast suburban sprawl of Australia is a chilling prospect.

Indeed, these operators call standalone residential dwellings "non-standard" connections because of the cost and complexity of running fibre all the way to the customers' premises. To them the NBN in Australia represents one big non-standard connection.

While operators in Hong Kong can connect people in multi-dwellings for as low as $130 per home, the cost of connecting standalone properties – of the type that dominate our vast suburbs - is far higher and costs many thousands of dollars.

Indeed, one of the more affluent residents in a detached dwelling had to pay Hong Kong Telecom an eye-watering $50,000 to have his house connected to FTTH. That's how much some non-standard connections can cost in the real world.

Think for a second about the amount of non-standard connections you will find in a country such as Australia - those with long driveways, for example, which are set well back from the road - and you begin to understand how big a challenge the full-cream NBN really presents.

Operators in Asian markets have faced other big challenges in connecting homes in multi-dwellings to FTTH, but these challenges are of a different nature. It takes the patience of Job to secure access agreements with building owners, management committees, unit owners and residents. It can easily take a couple of years to complete a single building.

The other big issue when you talk to operators who have rolled out ultra-fast broadband is the "need for speed"; that is to say, what are people doing in Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan with their cutting-edge 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) connections?

I asked that very question to some gentlemen from NTT West, which has 2 million 1Gbps FTTH subscribers in Japan. The answer? Pretty much the same things they were doing when they had 50 megabits per second services.

Indeed, they lamented the fact that a "speed war" is breaking out in Japan – they are themselves planning 10Gbps services – in which operators are competing on the basis of who can deliver the highest access speeds.

This is a huge problem because the operators have to invest in faster services but have to offer those services at the same price they were offering legacy 50Mbps and 100Mbps services, because subscribers won't pay extra for the faster speeds.

You will hear the same story from operators such as Hong Kong Broadband Network, whose executives freely admit that their 1Gbps subscribers are not really doing anything with those connections that subscribers on much lower speeds are unable to do – although that might change.

In terms of the transforming nature of FTTH in delivering revolutions in such areas as healthcare and education, progress has been slow in Asia.

Making significant changes to these sectors is a long-term task that requires the co-operation of, and collaboration with, a wide range of players in the value chain. So these will be long-term transitions.

The broader point here is clear: promising FTTH to a nation is one thing; delivering it is something else entirely. People need to keep that in mind when demanding their FTTH dream - we are talking about an extraordinary project here.

While the current ALP plan is the better one in theory, the Coalition plan - while still a huge project - is much more realistic and could be delivered cheaper and quicker because it avoids most of the last-mile construction work.